Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
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Matthew Arnold (1822-88) Life and character.- Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham, Middlesex, on December 24, and was educated at Winchester, Rugby, and Oxford. In 1847 he became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, and in 1851 was appointed to an inspectorship of schools, which he held till 1885. From 1857 to 1867 he was professor of poetry at Oxford. He lectured in America in 1883 and 1886. He died on April 15, 1888. Arnold long figured in popular imagination as a superior person, a dilettante apostle of culture, and an elegant and spurious Jeremiah., who was not to be taken too seriously. Certain mannierisms of his prose writings were, in part at least, responsible for this legendary perversion of his personality. He was in fact an earnest, sincere, hard-working, and thoroughly sympathetic man. Works.- His publications in verse are: Poetry.- The Strayed Reveller (1849) Empedocles on Etna (1852) Poems, second series (1855) Merope (1858) New Poems (1867) Prose.- Theoretical: Essays in Criticism (1855 and 1888) Mixed Essays (1879) Discourses in America (1885) On Translating Homer (1861-2) Celtic Literature (1867) Political: English and Italian Question (1859) Culture and Anarchy (1869) Friendship’s Garland (1871) Irish Essays (1882) Religious: Literature and Dogma (1873) St. Paul and Protestantism (1870) God and the Bible (1875) Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877). Views.- In his general conception of poetry the ethical element was in the ascendant. For a poet to be great it is necessary that he shall handle sound subject matter in a spirit of high seriousness. Poetry is “a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. (The Study of Poetry) “The greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life-to the question: How to live.” (Essay on Wordsworth) At this point the connection between Arnold’s theory and practice is very clear. Not so when we turn to his doctrine of the essential superiority of impersonal poetry to personal. Bred in the school of the Greeks, he held that all really great poetry is poetry in which, as in epic and drama, the poet goes out of himself. He also argued that, in order that the poet should get as far away from himself as possible, the subject should be chosen out of the past: The Greeks no doubt felt … that an action of present times was too near them, too much mixed up with what was accidental and passing, to form a sufficiently grand, detached, and self-subsistent object for a tragic poem. (Preface to Poems, 1853) The natural bias of Arnold’s genius was too strong for these theories, however, and the subjective element is to be noted in all his most vital work. Poems.- Narrative and Dramatic Poems are written in accordance with the doctrine of objective art. The finest of the narratives is Sohrab and Rustum, which is fashioned closely on the Homeric model. Balder Dead, from the Edda, is another Homeric echo. Despite the theoretic impersonality there is in the character of the Balder more than a hint of the poet himself. Tristam and Iseult, which borrows from the Arthurian legend cycle, is rather a series of dramatic lyrics than a regular narrative., and is instructive as showing Arnold’s inability to deal with intense passion. Of his two experiments in the drama, Empedocles on Etna is by far the more interesting, and this in part because the personal element encroaches strongly upon the dramatic. Merope is a tragedy on strictly classical lines, and, notwithstanding its technical perfection as an imitation, it serves to point the futility of such elaborate reproductions of dead forms. These impersonal poems are carefully wrought and contain passages of great beauty, but they are formal, stiff, and academic. His genius, as has been said, was not epic or dramatic; it was introspective, and his true field therefore lay in the lyric. Personal Poetry.- This is marked by a fine combination of sincerity and restraint. As he wrote of Sénancour’s Obermann: A fever in these pages burns Beneath the calm they feign. In Arnold’s case the fever was bred of his own spiritual struggles and deep realization of the religious upheaval of his age. He himself Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born; And while his manly sense prevented him from taking refuge in return to the past, he saw little in the present to encourage him. Yet his mood varies from the utter dejection of Dover Beach to the comparative hopefulness of The Future. On the whole he grew less pessimistic with advancing life, as we may see by comparing the two Obermann poems, separated in composition by eighteen years. An important division of his personal poetry is that which comprises his elegies. It is characteristic of him that he should be at his best in the mood of lament- as in Thyrsis, a monody on the death of Clough, and Rugby Chapel, in memory of his father. His elegiac poetry never confines itself to a simple expression of sorrow; it invariably becomes reflective and philosophical. At times the directly critical element is uppermost, as in Memorial Verses (1850) and Heine’s Grave, which are connecting links between Arnold’s work in verse and his work in prose. Prose works.- Essays in Criticism – the Doctrine of Culture.- Like many writers of the first rank, Arnold began life as a poet, and settled down at maturity to the production of critical and philosophical prose. In 1865 his Essays in Criticism inaugurated his remarkable influence upon students of literature and first attracted the attention of the public. The book determined his life-work, which was to produce what might be called a Bible of Culture. He wrote on literature and religion, on poetics and ethics, in a spirit which was a curious compound of the scholar ans the missionary. Actually he achieved much towards the standardization of taste, and towards introducing historical and scientific methods of criticism to English readers. Always openly ironical towards the middle classes and what he called Philistinism, he yet wrote more for the men of the world than for scholars, and, by virtue of the arresting novelty of his thought and style, did really awaken the ordinary man to some conception of art and some questioning upon religion and morality. Though never governed by practical considerations, his judgement was always practical, and he was inspired with an ardent desire for the intellectual upraising of his fellow-countrymen. The prosperous complacency, the mental indolence, and the hustling efficiency of the average Victorian were the subjects of his urbane ridicule. Superficially a bundle of contradictions- gibing at academic routine with all the polish of the academics; a Liberal who scorned the vulgar majority; lightly satirizing the Churches while labouring his own gospel of sweetness and light; denying all tradition or dogma which could not be intellectually justified-there lay behind this elegant persiflage and studied worldliness a strong undercurrent of serious intention. He cared profoundly about truth and beauty. He deeply admired sanity, and he earnestly laboured to improve mankind. The jaunty manner of his rebuke was natural and spontaneous, and was probably the most efficient instrument for his purpose. He never encouraged a mere dalliance among the fields of art, and demanded from himself and his readers the hardest mental toil. His love of the classics gave him a certain severity. The critic, he tells us, must “endeavour in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is.” (Essays in Criticism) There is in reality no marked distinction to be made between the various groups of subjects upon which he wrote. The two volumes of Essays in Criticism (1855, and 1888), parts of Mixed Essays (1879), and Discourses in America (1885) belong more exclusively to literature, while On Translating Homer (1861-2) and Celtic Literature (1867) were lectures delivered during the tenure of his Oxford professorship. The social Political group began with the English and Italian Question (1859), followed by Culture and Anarchy (1869), which, with Friendship’s Garland (1871), is perhaps his most characteristic work. Irish Essays appeared in 1882. Literature and Dogma (1873) aroused more opposition and more applause than any of his other writings on religion, which include St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), God and the Bible (1875), and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877). Characteristics.- Arnold’s poetry has in a high degree the classic qualities of poise, temperance, and reserve. Careful workmanship and purity and dignity of style are among its prominent technical features. Though his ear was not perfect, his lyrical measure are generally satisfying, while his blank verse has a stately movement of its own. His moral spirit is always noble, and his fine stoicism prevents his melancholy from becoming debilitating. But his austerity and apparent coldness, and his want of joyful and bounding emotion, have stood in the way of his popularity, and he is still a master for the cultured few. As critic he is also important. Arnold was a man of sound and wide scholarship, and his mental powers, by assiduous training, had been sharpened into a most delicate instrument. He held before him a very high and arduous ideal-in his phrase- “the law of pure and flawless workmanship”- and he is perpetually endeavouring to fix a canon of judgement. This canon is less a philosophy than a number of touchstones, which after all bring the test of good work back to the direct appreciation of the man of culture.